Little Girl Lost and Found

If Guinness heiress Ivana Lowell had a fairy-tale childhood, it was the kind seemingly shadowed by evil spells and a profound confusion about just who she was. Her memoir is a triumph of hope and human spirit.

Ivana Lowell's Why Not Say What Happened? is a particularly lucid memoir of growing up in simultaneous extremes of privilege and neglect. The book is a riveting history of a family that folds in on itself, consuming generation after generation with money, power, alcoholism, and profound selfishness and emotional disconnection. Lowell's compact, finely tuned paragraphs render the saga with brave urgency and courage, and while the import and impact of events is horrifyingly clear, there's an absence of melodrama to the telling and a deep compassion— call it love—for those who failed the author so miserably.

I sat down with Ivana in the Sag Harbor, New York, house she inherited from her mother, Caroline Blackwood, whom I knew during the last years of her life. The house is now a much more placid establishment than it was under Caroline's reign, when it was always charged with drama— who was coming, who had just gone—all of life lived as if on a precipice about to crash into a storm-tossed sea. Ivana does share with her mother a rather profound intensity, though her eyes are a deep and forgiving brown and not the famous terrifying blue that Caroline would focus upon you like X-ray specs. Despite the memoir's self-exposure, in person Ivana has an English affect, saying less rather than more.

Ivana's "mum," Caroline, was the daughter of Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, the Fourth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, and brewery heiress Maureen Guinness—one of three sisters renowned in the 1930s as the "Golden Guinness Girls." The multigenerational prominence of the Guinness family includes today a high-profile role in the fashion world: Ivana is cousin to style icon Daphne Guinness as well as model Jasmine Guinness.

Lady Caroline was a brilliant author of 10 books and was often described as a muse. She was first married to painter Lucian Freud and then to composer Israel Citkowitz, with whom she had three daughters: Natalya, Evgenia, and—for many years it was assumed—Ivana. Later, Lady Caroline married the American poet Robert Lowell, and Ivana took his name. (Ivana's two sisters declined to make the name change.) The day after Lady Caroline's death in 1996, Ivana was told by one of her mother's oldest friends that her father was not Citkowitz but screenwriter Ivan Moffat, or perhaps Robert Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books, who had long played a paternal role in her life. The surrounding confusion and subsequent DNA tests confirming that Moffat was her father got Ivana writing. "It wasn't so much cathartic, but in putting it out there and reading it, instead of being so angry, I really missed everyone. I wished they were here."

Author Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon), a longtime mutual friend, describes Ivana's family as "the original marriage of brilliance and madness, impossibly glamorous and terrifyingly unreliable. I have never laughed as much with anyone as I used to with Ivana and her mother, but I have also been only seldom in touch with someone who could be as casually cruel as Caroline. Her good and bad qualities were so tightly entwined that you could no more separate them than you could a person's heart and brain."

Ivana also endured sexual abuse by her nanny's husband, which stopped only after a horrible kitchen accident in which Lowell was scalded by boiling water so badly that she was not expected to survive. She recalls liking the specialness of those "awful evening visits" and "realizing now as the parent of a young daughter how truly awful it was. I knew it was something that...was to be ashamed of, and I didn't want to fess up. It was my guilty secret. I was 13 when I finally said something."

Ivana spent months in a burn unit, her mother and Robert Lowell at her side. Much later, reading her mother's work from that time, Ivana says, "It was hard to read her writing. It was very dark—wonderful but dark. I read some short stories, one about a burns unit, and I said, `Mum, you're writing about me.' She said, `Oh, no—it's another burns unit.' " Lowell laughs and recollects how kind her stepfather was during this period. "It's a side of him that no one ever writes or hears about," she says, "so sweet, so cozy and considerate."

courtesy of Amazon.com

More often one hears about Robert Lowell's madness and his being carted away in ambulances. "Mum was very good about hiding it from us," Ivana says, "but a couple of times I saw him act really odd." Lowell famously died of a heart attack in 1977 in the back of a taxi from JFK airport in New York while returning to his previous wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, clutching in his arms a painting of Caroline—a portrait by her first husband, Lucian Freud. Ivana remembers shopping for dresses for Lowell's funeral at Harrods with her older sister, Natalya, as one of the "good moments." Just a year later, Natalya was dead of a drug overdose at 18, and the family was never the same.

Andrew Solomon elaborates: "By and large, the one recompense for people who are neglected is that they look pathetic and everyone treats them with compassion. If you come from one of the most glamorous families in England and are neglected, the compassion can be in short supply. So I think that combination is a very dangerous one. Ivana was a much-loved child. She had so much of what most impoverished lives lack, and lacked so much of what even impoverished lives contain, and other people had a hard time understanding that. Most of us have scars on our faces, but hers were in the most hidden places."

Ivana doesn't push back against her family's history. She seems enthralled with all its twists and turns, raising the question—can one get free of the past rather than be damned to repeat the same mistakes? "I don't think you're ever free," she says. "Writing the book, I did get a better understanding, and I did feel quite proud. Everyone's very interesting, eccentric, scary—I don't think I would have preferred having a `normal' family. I do associate normal with boring, which is really bad." No stranger to the family battle with alcohol, Ivana has been to rehab five times.

Adding to the family's literary legacy, Ivana's younger sister, Evgenia Citkowitz, who is married to actor Julian Sands, also published a promising first book of short stories last spring, titled Ether. In her finely crafted stories, one sees the threads of family connection—adults paralyzed by denial and alcoholism, the sense of things being perpetually on the verge of collapse. Citkowitz declined to be interviewed for this piece, and there is clearly tension between the sisters. Ivana says only, "I love my sister very much. We have been through quite a lot together, and she has always been there for me. I don't think she has read my book yet, but I thought her short stories were very powerful, and I am so proud of her."

Our meeting is brought to a perfect end by the arrival of Daisy, Lowell's 11-year-old daughter by ex-husband Matthew Miller. Lowell's current beau, the writer Howard Blum, is somewhere in the house. As we say our goodbyes, Lowell is preparing to take her daughter and Blum to Ireland to meet the family. Growing up in the United States has spared Daisy a certain amount of family drama, and Blum has met some of the cousins but "hasn't seen them in their natural habitat," Lowell quips. She is cheerful about the trip, looking forward to visiting her mother's surviving sister, Perdita, and showing Daisy the house where she grew up and thinking about what she's going to write next—more about the family. When asked whether her life now feels more of a piece, she smiles, strokes Daisy's hair, and says, "It's really nice when you can appreciate things in the moment."

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